The video, which has gone viral on social media, is hard to watch.
A pregnant Black woman, in what appears to be an emergency department intake office, is seated in a wheelchair, obviously in labor. She squirms and cries out in pain as a white woman sitting at a computer a few feet away — a nurse — does nothing to help. She continues asking the pregnant woman routine questions about her medical history, seemingly oblivious to the patient’s distress.
“When is your due date?” the nurse asks, matter-of-factly. The pregnant woman, writhing nearly out of the wheelchair in agony, replies immediately.
“Now!” she screams.
Then, the mother of Karrie Jones, the pregnant woman, cuts to the heart of the matter: “Y’all treat all your patients like this, or just the Black ones?”
The scene, which unfolded Oct. 11 at Dallas Regional Medical Center in Mesquite, Texas, explains better than any study why the U.S. has the highest maternal mortality rate of all developed nations — and why Black women have a rate that’s three times as high as white women. Experts say Jones’ distress and the nurse’s apparent neglect of it are examples of the larger problem.
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Dr. Kameelah Phillips, an obstetrician and a Black woman, made it plain in an Instagram reel:
“It’s not just bad behavior. It’s discriminatory,” she said. “This is our maternal mortality numbers, this is how Black women end up ignored, undiagnosed, untreated, and unprotected.”
Black women, she says, “deserve urgency, compassion, and clinical excellence. This ain’t it.”
The original video poster, identified as Kash, shows her daughter, Karrie Jones, in active labor at the medical center. Jones had reportedly waited more than 30 minutes in the waiting area and delivered her baby roughly 12 minutes after finally being taken to the labor and delivery.
In a follow-up video posted to TikTok, Kash said her daughter had gone into labor at home and called the hospital to give them a heads-up before arriving.
Dallas Regional Medical Center/Prime Healthcare officials did not respond to Word In Black’s request for an interview. In a statement shortly after the video went viral, the hospital did not directly address the incident, pointing to patient privacy laws.
According to the statement, the hospital prioritizes “the safety, dignity, and well-being of our patients,” and hospital officials are reviewing the situation to understand what happened to Jones.
Maternal Death Statistics Aren’t Improving
The United States faces one of the worst maternal mortality crises among developed countries. It has a maternal death rate that is roughly double or triple that of many peer nations. The burden falls heaviest on Black women; in 2023, they died at up to 4 times the rate of white women and far above Hispanic and Asian women.
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released in April show that more U.S. women died around the time of childbirth in 2024 than in 2023. The trend reverses two years later when numbers improved for all demographics — except for Black women. The death rate for Black moms in childbirth increased slightly during that time period.
The CDC said 688 people died last year during pregnancy or shortly after giving birth. That’s up from 669 deaths in 2023, but down from 2022 and 2021, when it was the highest level in more than 50 years.
Just as phone cameras and social media video shifted the conversation around police brutality, videos of expectant Black mothers in distress could be raising awareness of the disparate medical treatment Black women face.
On Monday, Instagram user lawyerbaeesq posted a video showing a Black woman who was reportedly denied treatment at an Indiana hospital. The social media post notes that hospitals, by law, are required to treat and stabilize someone in medical distress “no matter your insurance, financial status, or ability to pay.”
Mercedes Wells told ABC News 7 that Franciscan Health Crown Point Hospital in Crown Point, Indiana, refused to treat her despite rapid contractions indicating the baby would arrive any minute. As a result, she gave birth to her fourth child in her car on the side of a road as her husband delivered the baby.
In June, the Trump administration reversed federal Biden-era guidance that under EMTALA required emergency rooms to provide an abortion if the procedure would save a patient’s life. However, the law’s other provisions remained intact.
They’ve Got Equipment, But Maybe Not Empathy
It’s clear, however, that the incident struck a nerve, and not just with Black women. The video of Jones rocketed around the internet as an example of how the medical profession tends to disregard the pain of women in general, and Black women in particular.
One Black OB-GYN, who agreed to speak to Word In Black anonymously, said the incident was “ disheartening” but not surprising.
“It is a direct result of lack of empathy,” says the doctor, who practices in Texas. “As a physician, it is exhausting to hear these same statistics continuously. The awareness [of bias in maternal healthcare] is growing, but until racism is addressed, nothing will change.”
Nevertheless, ”there are other questions that we should be asking” about the level of care at the Dallas Regional Medical Center, she says. That includes whether the hospital was cited for the incident, if a doctor was on call, or whether any other specialists had seen Jones before or after the video.
“Given her obvious physical symptoms and the fact that she appeared to be in active labor, did other people on the labor and delivery unit see her?” the doctor says. “There are so many unanswered but necessary questions.”